Services held for players

Dozens of Venezuelans were waiting in lines Saturday outside a chapel in Barquisimeto in the state of Lara, Venezuela, to bid farewell to former major league baseball player Luis Valbuena, who was killed in a car accident along with teammate Jose Castillo. Castillo’s corpse was moved earlier Saturday to a different central-west state. Valbuena, 33, and Castillo, 37, were both former players for the Houston Astros. They died late Thursday when their SUV crashed as it tried to avoid an object in the road. Officials said some bandits place or throw objects on highways to force vehicles to stop so they can rob the occupants. Carlos Rivero, a third baseball player who survived the crash, visited the chapel Saturday wearing dark sunglasses and bore a small bruise on his forehead. Four people have been detained after being found with property belonging to the athletes. Valbuena and Castillo were teammates on the Cardenales de Lara team in the Venezuelan winter league and were returning from a game in the capital when the crash occurred en route to Barquisimeto. League President Juan Jose Avila told Union Radio that he was evaluating the possibility of forbidding players from traveling in private cars to move between games, saying if the players had been on the team bus, “nothing would have happened to them.” Venezuelan teams tend to travel in buses protected by security forces.